Court Ruling May Bury `Village' Of Homer Glen

There will be no new village in southwest suburban Homer Township this year--or maybe ever.

To that, some longtime opponents of municipal incorporation for the fast-growing township say good--and good riddance.

Having successfully fended off previous attempts to grow a municipality within Homer Township's 36 square miles, anti-incorporation residents say an Illinois Appellate Court opinion made public Tuesday may ultimately have sounded the death knell for the issue.

"It's over. It's dead. And they won't be able to bring it back for many, many years . . . if ever," said Homer resident Emily Skogh, who was among those who challenged the May 1996 incorporation petition in Will County Circuit Court.

In a unanimous decision, the three-judge appeals panel in Ottawa upheld a 1996 Circuit Court ruling that nullified a petition by the Township of Homer Incorporation Committee seeking to hold another binding referendum on the well-worn issue of incorporation.

THINC was looking to get voter approval to fashion the Village of Homer Glen out of about 14 square miles of the township's most heavily populated and commercially rich areas between Lockport and Orland Park.

The group initially was looking for the issue to be on the ballot last fall, or this April or November. But like other previous incorporation attempts, the Homer Glen initiative sputtered and failed without even making it to the ballot.

When they had the chance to vote, in an advisory referendum in 1988 and again in a binding vote in 1995, Homer voters rejected incorporation by ratios of 2-1 and 3-2, respectively.

THINC was hoping that Homer Glen--a smaller, more pro-municipal government area of voters than either of the failed proposals, Goodings Grove in 1988 and Messenger Woods in 1995--would be the charm.

The prospect of restarting the effort is more vague than ever. THINC attorney Sheldon Lebold said his group thought that the Appellate Court opinion would at least clarify how a combination of state laws affecting village incorporation petitions should be legally meshed. But he said it didn't.

"If I were looking at this decision and was trying to incorporate, say, Jonesville, I wouldn't know where to go," said Lebold.

He added that, because of the lingering legal ambiguities, he was unsure whether incorporation is feasible or would ever again be attempted in Homer.

"This is awful law," he said.

The effect of the opinion, which affirmed the summer 1996 decision by Circuit Judge William Penn, is to let stand an order that requires incorporation petitions to be cleared for the ballot by the County Board before being brought to Circuit Court for a hearing on legal objections.

Penn ruled that the petition filed with him last May was premature and therefore invalid because it hadn't been presented first to the County Board.

THINC went to the County Board first in 1994. But at that time, it was forced to settle for a vote on a much-reduced incorporation area after about 40 property owners filed petitions to annex to Lockport in the weeks between the time it began seeking County Board clearance and filed the incorporation map with the court.

Penn's decision gave property owners opposed to incorporation an opportunity to withdraw from the Homer Glen map by formally seeking to annex to Lockport someday. The resulting out-migration severed a narrow land bridge at 151st Street and Will-Cook Road connecting the two large geographical bodies that made up the proposed village of 17,000.

The appeals court's affirmation of Penn's decision breaks the incorporation map in half. Any revival of the incorporation effort would either be confined to a much smaller geographic area or to a similarly sized area if another bridge between north and south could be established elsewhere.

"It wasn't feasible before and is less so now (with the appeals court's opinion)," said attorney Louis Yangas, a longtime incorporation opponent.

"Originally, (THINC) said the money that was going to be derived from (the proposed Interstate Highway 355 extension) was absolutely vital to the future of this village. Then, when they initiated their next so-called incorporation effort, they deleted all that.

"So, even though it was vital, apparently it was no longer necessary (for Homer Glen). I can't conceive of it being possible now."

Any revived incorporation attempt would have to be started almost from scratch, including development of a new map, said Lebold.

"The timing is such that there is no conceivable way" of reviving the issue in time for the November ballot, he said, even if a contingency plan based on an unfavorable court decision were already in place.

The last Will County municipality to be incorporated was Bolingbrook in 1965. Only about a dozen municipalities have been created in Illinois since 1980.

"The motivation of incorporation was to preserve the integrity of Homer Township as a distinct and separate community, irrespective of what the opposition is talking about," Lebold said. "The purpose was to maintain our area as a self-contained, homogeneous area--to at least all be members of one community.

"The effect of this case is that it is likely over a period of years that Homer will be eroded more and more by way of annexations into the adjacent communities, which are Lemont, New Lenox, possibly Orland Park and obviously Lockport."

Resident Skogh said anti-incorporation forces in Homer are closely monitoring the activities of the adjacent suburbs and are gearing up to fight any wholesale division of the unincorporated township Homer by its municipal neighbors.